


When in Rome, shoot some Romans

by kattnmaus



Series: Aftershock Tales [2]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Dimension Travel, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-11
Updated: 2015-08-11
Packaged: 2018-04-14 03:02:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4547694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattnmaus/pseuds/kattnmaus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One moment, The Winter Soldier is clearing a facility under orders in a place even he can't pronounce correctly, the next, he's waking up face-first on the pavement in an American back-alley thousands of miles and decades away from where he started, and an entire universe removed from everything he knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When in Rome, shoot some Romans

The world returned slowly from silence into a muddled din of traffic noises. 

Everything tasted of concrete and ash, nothing wanted to move, feeling weighted to the floor like a blanket of lead. 

Floor?

Finally an eye was forced open, finding an expanse of concrete and grime that smelled like dumpsters and public urination beneath his cheek.

Street. City street, not floor. 

City street??

Both eyes opened, every ounce of will poured into the feeble push and groan that lifted the resistant body from the foul surface. Bits of detritus were scattered on the surface, candy wrappers, straw papers, empty paper cups and grocery bags littering various areas that he could see. The source of the dumpster smell was indeed a dumpster, two of them in fact, and he corrected 'Street' to 'Alleyway'.

Alleyway. City. 

What the hell?

He sat up, rubbing a black-gloved hand through short brown hair for a moment, eying his surroundings with a frown.

NOT the laboratory.

He very clearly remembered being in a laboratory, second sublevel of a facility he'd been sent to clean up. Lots of strange men in white coats and a few even stranger in green and yellow... and that beekeeper asshole...

He paused. 

Beekeeper... that creepy goon in the mask he'd seen... and that stupid glowy... glow... everywhere. Of course, why did the bad things always glow weird colors? Weird colors and crazy people who liked to monologue until he shot them in the face, like he actually cared what kind of magical wonder-waffles they'd baked up this time to burn the world with, he was...

Wait.

He gave himself a cursory check and patdown for injuries, checked the functionality of his arm where it whirred grumpily after catching a few bullets badly too close to the wrist, then returned his attention to his surroundings, which were still as relatively deserted and foul smelling as any trash-filled alleyway in a major city could be. Which major city and where was a question that needed answered, and then he needed to check in, figure out just how badly the mission was wrecked, and see what could be done to salvage it. He needed... well, he needed to stand up without falling on his damn ass, that would be a good start, he grumbled and rubbed his hip where it had hit the filthy street on his way back to the pavement. 

So smooth, yes, the most graceful among operatives, tripping over his own damn oh GOD what is that SMELL?!?

He choked back a retch, covering his nose and glaring at the noise as something rumbled down a chute and dropped into the dumpster, setting loose a cloud of stench that drove him to his feet and away from the alley, stealth be damned. He staggered out onto the sidewalk, barely missing a collision with an annoyed pedestrian, then a cyclist, then a parking meter as he scrambled away from them in succession. He finally paused for breath in front of a shop with gated windows, gasping for air and reeling at the cacophony of motion and sound around him.

City. Street. Stone and Brick buildings. Yellow Taxis. English Voices. ANGRY English voices... lots of swearing between drivers and rude hand gestures, followed by poor examples of aggressive driving skills in close traffic conditions.

(Must be America...) his brain supplied automatically with a vaguely sarcastic tone as a bike messenger kicked a car door shut and ducked between cars, flipping a deuce at the car's owner as they yelled after the cyclist.

America...

“дерьмо.” He looked at the shiny red star painted on his shinier silver arm, then looked around the street. Street graffiti of the Statue of liberty in pink polka-dot underwear painted on a closed-up shop facade, lots of red, white, and blue in assorted places, and he was standing there like the most visible non-secret weapon in history with everything short of a giant “If found please return to the Red Motherland” on his uniform.

He was going to find and kill the beekeeper slowly and painfully, mission or no if this was his fault. Dumping the Fist of the Soviets into some random American city was beyond all forgiveness or merciful deaths.

He started to head back toward the alley for cover then remembered the smell and performed an almost comedic about-face in the middle of the sidewalk, stuffing his fists into his pockets and trudging along as if a heavily-armed man glowering at people from behind a black domino mask could be made any less conspicuous by doing the pocket-trudge-and-walk-quickly thing.

Honestly, no, it did not, but it made people less likely to look at him for extended periods of time and more likely to get the hell out of his way upon noticing him he quickly learned. He jerked backward in mid-step and stared frozen into the windows of a store display. 

Televisions, a whole PILE of televisions, all in bright glorious color, and some of them flatter and thinner than a book and larger than a table, all of them showing the same news broadcast about flying robots and a giant green man in tiny pants smashing around somewhere. The nagging itch to collect information about the potential threat of a robot army rampaging loose somewhere was brushed aside by fascination with the bright shiny vivid colors and quick moving images with text scrolling across the bottom of them informing the viewer what was going on in the scenes as they unfolded. 

A strange one of the robots opened his head and a human face smiled with a cocky grin into the camera. Not a robot, a man in a suit busy helping smash the robots, who still had time to pose for the cameras. Something itched in the back of his mind, something he did not like at the sight of that man's mustachioed mug. He realized that by standing still gaping he was beginning to attract attention, and ducked his head and hurried away with a glare at the people. One of them had a pink and black rectangle pointed at him and seemed to be looking at it as he walked away, he had the urge to snatch the object out of the guy's hand and smash it on general principles. Stupid American city people and their....

Ooh. That smells nice...

He ducked through the next alley, following the smell to a building with a sign that said something about a “Meal Ministry”. Ugh, religious weirdos feeding the poor people to make themselves feel better about having beds when these many did not. He kept back out of sight, then quirked an eyebrow at one of the volunteers handing a jacket to one of the homeless people waiting near the doors to the building. He glanced down at the uniform and shiny star on his arm, then back to the building as his stomach rumbled.

“Предатель” he muttered as it growled.

He looked down with a slight frown, resting the non-metal hand over his stomach. Disguise and sustenance were a priority need, contact and report moved a notch down the list, and a notch further down again as the nagging WRONGness of everything started to catch up with him. The televisions, strange clothing and vehicle models, stranger technology, and the army of flying robots and giant green men had definitely never been on any of his briefings about the Americans. He sighed, surveying the building and forming a plan. 

He hated pretending to be American, certain people teased him constantly because his accent was so good, he'd even heard one of his mission handlers call him “The American” to his colleagues. A perfect neutral midwest accent was hard to master, he considered it a mark of his skills to have done so and had been proud of it, before the taunting anyway. They knew it irked him, it was why they allowed it to happen, and why he'd been chastised for speaking up against those who picked at his speech. Not that he cared what they said. Not really. He just disliked people thinking he actually WAS American, because he wasn't.  
He wasn't.

-=-

After planning and exploring a circuitous route to the location of the “free clothing” area with the intent of stealing something wearable, he ended up just grabbing one of the cleaner indigents in the area, knocking him out, and 'borrowing' his overcoat as a shortcut. He'd tucked his mask into one of his pouches, mussed his hair, and stuffed his hands in his pockets, hoping for the best.

He almost felt bad for a moment how intent these people were at helping out the 'poor young man who'd gotten stranded on hard times'. He kept his left hand in his pocket as they brought him inside, showed him to a seat and brought him a meal. The grumpy whirring when he moved his wrist betrayed him only once, and he hastily explained it as a defective prosthetic, nothing to worry about. Some of the others treated him less-than-subtly different after that, and he quickly realized it wasn't suspicion but sympathy. They spoke to him gently, and thought him a veteran of some recent conflict fallen by the wayside. The itch to flee became a burn, white-hot and angry, only partially drowned out with the taste of excellent chili and homemade bread covered in real butter.

Was this a thing that happened so frequently in America? Disabled soldiers being forgotten by their people, allowed to fall away ignored and unsupported into vagrancy instead of being honored for their service and sacrifice to their country? No wonder so many countries wanted to wipe the capitalists off the map if this was how they treated their returned soldiers often enough that even the dispossessed of the streets knew of it intimately and treated them better than their own government did.

Decision made. Change of plans. Contact and Report slid further down the priority list as research and figure out what the hell was wrong with this place popped up onto it. The nagging itch got louder and angrier, and he almost swatted at it like a physical annoyance buzzing around his head before he caught himself and jammed his hands back into his pockets, staring furiously into his empty bowl for a moment before looking around at the concerned faces that were trying their best not to look as though they were watching him and failing miserably at it. He excused himself politely, thanking them for the meal and moving to stand. One of the older men he'd been seated near, a battered old hat with a picture of a ship of some sort and numbers on it, asked him his name, and he paused for a long moment.

“Yasha,” he said quickly, not sure why he'd actually answered and quite certain beyond all doubt that he shouldn't have as he made his way to the exit and made himself vanish into the darkening streets as evening approached. No, he would not be going back there, they would not see him again, never again would he accept their charity or kindness. Anyone's charity or kindness. 

If he was to be trapped in this place until extraction, he was going to have to find his own way in this place. No matter where...

Damn.

He still hadn't learned where he was.

“Hey, cab-man!” he called to a cab-driver who was getting into his car. The man jerked back with a sour glare.

“You got a problem?”

“Yeah, I got a problem, I got lost walking around. Where the hell am I?” direct approach, might as well. The man scoffed at him with a snort.

“You're in Hoboken, dumbass,” the man called back as he slid into the driver's seat and started up his cab. He flipped the bird out the window as he drove past, and Yasha made sure to remember his cab number for reasons he'd think about later.

“Hoboken. Where the hell is Hoboken?” he asked himself aloud, then like a rusty door squeaking open with extreme effort he managed to drag up a mental map of the United States to remember enough geography to grumble under his breath in at least two languages.

“New Jersey.”

Distaste for the words soured his mouth, he had never been here but he could remember them being spoken in such a way by someone else, the speaker themself long forgotten. After his brief time here he agreed, New Jersey was not for him. He started walking in a random direction, lost in thought. New Jersey was bad, but New Jersey was next to New York, shining beacon of dumb America's heart and oh wow that's pretty...

He stopped short at the corner, looking out at the small park across the street, and the river beyond. The skyline of the city beyond the river glowed in the oncoming dusk, burning brightly with the glow of millions of windows, billions of streetlights. A blazing forest of steel and stone and glass, all strong angles and luminous shafts of raw industrial wattage burning back the oncoming darkness. Long moments were spent watching the last of the sunset's color drain from the sky, the ink of true night never quite reaching the glittering city reflected across the water.

“Wow.”

He finally breathed out the word softly. Some part of him thought there should be flying cars, and dirigibles that turned into spaceships cruising around the skyscrapers. He shook his head, frowning at the idea and the vague recollection of having watched a film about a robot girl flooding an underground city hidden beneath a similar shining metropolis. It was late, he was getting tired, and the coat he'd 'borrowed' smelled like whiskey and bad life choices, with a gentle side-aroma of old cigarettes.

He found a roof with a good view of the surroundings and easy access from the ground, and a nice roof garden for shelter and snacks, and settled in for the night.

Tomorrow... well, he'd think about tomorrow when it happened.

Right now, sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> \--+--  
> my word processor likes to autocorrect things that are not wrong for me and is dumb, and I have no beta reader, so apologies as I try to catch errors.
> 
> \--The Current Players--
> 
> Yasha, Pulled from the earliest days of the Winter Soldier, before even the faintest glimmers of Bucky Barnes started to return to the empty shell of the young man pulled from the ice and revived by the soviets to become their pet killing machine. Amnesiac and ruthless, amoral and dangerous, with a wicked sense of gallows humor and an instinctive dislike of anything wearing the American flag.
> 
> (others to be revealed later, and yes, he gets to meet Hawkeye AND Daredevil, because reasons, you'll see.)
> 
> also, there needs to be a tag for "Bucky Barnes has a foul mouth" because he is constantly being censored in some of the comics, and I intend to continue that fine tradition for all his variations, including Yasha. All non-english courtesy of google translate, because if Yasha spoke slovak, i'd be mostly fine, but russian I know like 6 words of, and all of them are names of old family recipes, so I apologize to all, and will be using 'translated' speech in english once there's actual conversations instead of random words from the google-lator.


End file.
